The Barbican are set to host a night celebrating the work of Lee Hazlewood. It’s taking place on October 25, and features performances from a band made up of singer-songwriter Ed Harcourt, Adrian Utley from Portishead, Jim Sclavunos of The Bad Seeds fame, as well as Romeo Stodart from The Magic Numbers and Polar Bear’s Tom Herbert. There will be a varied cast of singers, including Jehnny Beth from Savages, Matthew E. White, Josh T Pearson, Caitlin Rose, Lawrence Hayward and Kathryn Williams, with more to be announced.
The event is being curated by Harcourt and Wyndham Wallace, friend and former manager of Lee Hazlewood, as well as a long-term tQ contributor, who has recently published his book, Lee, Myself & I: Inside The Very Special World Of Lee Hazlewood. We recently published an extract from the book, part of a conversation between Wyndham and Lee from mid-2006, roughly a year before his death.
Read a segment of that below, while tickets and further details of the event are here.
"’I remember going to a club,’ he says, picking at a chicken leg, ‘where there were all these kids eating sugar lumps. And I asked a friend what the hell they were doing. "Oh, they’re taking acid," he said. And that’s why I wrote "Sugar Town". And, by the way, none of the radio stations knew I was writing about kids taking acid, but that’s ‘cos the censors only see things literally. That’s all they care about. It’s like "Boots": "You’ve been messing where you shouldn’t have been a’messing?" Messing? That’s the F-word in Texas! When someone tells you they’ve been out messing around, you know they didn’t spend the night alone!’
Sometimes Lee’s eyes glisten with glee at the things he’s done, just as they do when he recalls his family, the girlfriends he had, the parties he attended, the Hollywood house he once kept, and of course the money he’s made. Lee loves his money, and he probably knows what he was paid for every job he’s ever done—and, quite possibly, the price of every steak he’s ordered. Nonetheless, despite his fondness for cash, rarely was a man less flash. I only discover he’s paying for my hotel when I arrive at reception, and after this first lunch he leaves me with his boarding pass and its PIN number, telling me to visit the Feast Buffet at his expense as often as I want."
